Global Democracy Train Finds Zimbabwe a Barrier

The national election which has just taken place in the Southern African country of Zimbabwe had a foregone outcome.

President Robert Mugabe, who has ruled the country for twenty-eight
years after winning an armed struggle against a white supremacy regime,
will force himself once again upon his people.

While we was once extremely popular in his country and around the
world, as a “saviour” for his nation, he now holds onto
power by intimidation and rigged elections, while the Movement for
Democratic Change (MDC) party and others try to find a way to unseat
him.

Zimbabwe, in recent years, has become an abjectly poor country with an
inflation rate currently of three million percent. Mugabe has
taken away the land of his white farming class, who were a large part
of Zimbabwe’s economy, in favour of giving land to demobilized
soldiers who are his greatest support but not productive in a modern,
capitalist sense.

Many people have left the country – both white and black - out of
fear for their lives or due to loss of livelihood. Recently,
anti-foreign riots broke out in South Africa because the thousands of
Zimbabwean black refugees living there are accused of taking jobs from
the poor in that country.

While leaders around the world, from George Bush to Nelson Mandela,
speak out against Mugabe and his tactics – Mandela called the
Zimbabwean situation “a tragic failure of leadership”
– Mugabe answers back, saying that he is fighting against a
global colonial system that is led by countries such as Great Britain
that have dominated Southern Africa in the past and wish to do so
again.

Mugabe, who is in his mid-80s, has agreed to talk with the Zimbabwean
opposition after his electoral victory is complete, but it is expected
that he is preparing for the transition of his supporters into power,
rather than making way for democracy.

A worldwide move to replace dictatorship and rigged elections has been
practiced on an almost industrial scale since the Soviet Union
collapsed in 1989.

From Eastern Europe and the Middle East, to Asia and Africa, the
“march” of democracy has captured the imaginations of the
disenfranchised and those watching from afar.

Mugabe’s Zimbabwe is not an isolated case, but rather a
noticeably difficult one. In this particular case, and in similar
situations in Ukraine, Georgia and even Lebanon, it is a battle between
the spread of liberal democracy and global capital, and the nationalism
and control to which an old generation of leaders cling.

The freedom train chugging around the world is made up of opposition
groups, often trained and financed by Western interests (but still
legitimately wanting freedom) who use the exposing of rigged elections
and civil oppression as a way of discrediting and ultimately replacing
their governments.

In the case of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Rose Revolution
in Georgia earlier this decade, Victor Yushchenko and Mikael Sakashvili
respectively rode to power on the public’s standing up to
authorities after questionable election results. Whipping up the
crowds with placards, rock music and putting themselves “on the
line” were often young people who’d been trained and funded
by democracy promoting foundations linked to the US political system
and freedom promoters such as US billionaire George Soros.

This strategy works very well when the people in power are not quite
prepared to go to war against their own people. In other
countries such as Russia, Belarus and, obviously now, Zimbabwe, the
authorities will hang onto power with as much force as it takes.

While the West may want regime change in Zimbabwe, they are not
prepared to allow the carnage of a civil war in order to achieve it.

Robert Mugabe won’t give up power, he says, because that would be
giving in to the forces of colonialism and imperialism.

Of course, few people have any understanding of, or patience for, that
kind of rhetoric today. As well, it would seem evident that his
people are abjectly poor because he refuses to allow them to be part of
the system that dominates economic life and that assigns Africans a
little bit to live on – not nearly enough, but at least not
nothing.

The world that Mugabe shuns (and that shuns Mugabe) is dominated by
capital. Corporations and their political representatives seem to
make the decisions while the rest of the world benefits, in relative
terms, or copes.

While some African leaders, such as South African statesmen Mandela and
Desmond Tutu and former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan use their
“political capital” to call the West to account and fight
for aid, debt relief and fairer trade regulations, Mugabe turns his
country into a police state. He doesn’t want to be part of
the political or economic games played out globally, but what he is
left with, in “victory,” is nothing.